


When the Centauri Landed...

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [74]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Catholicism, Centauri, Discrimination, Fix-It, Gen, Illegitimate Children, Martyrdom, New Zealand, Orphans, Parental Death, Pogroms, Psi Corps, Psi Corps Old Families (Babylon 5), Teen Pregnancy, The Corps is Mother and Father, The Violence of 2156 (Babylon 5), Violence, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 12:18:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12132348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The history of the Chastain family, one of the "old families" in the Corps. (Lyta's family, the Alexander family, is another "old family".)This story is adapted from Gregory Keyes, Deadly Relations. p. 15.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	When the Centauri Landed...

**Author's Note:**

> Dates have been changed by 100 years, to correct a canon error (or typo).
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!

Amanda Chastain was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2135 to a devoutly Catholic family. However, she got pregnant at the age of fifteen, and was forced to leave home. She moved into a home run by the Church for runaway teens, and gave birth at sixteen to a daughter, Grace.

Many of the teens in the home, she learned, had run away from home (or been pushed out) because they were telepaths. New Zealand, unlike many other countries of the period, had no telepath registration laws, and the politicians steadfastly refused to follow the example of the United States and Europe in that regard, but some families were still scared and prejudiced, and so some telepath teens were homeless. It was impossible to get solid data on how many, since there were no registration laws and most telepath teens didn't want to publicly come out about it, in case it came back to haunt them later. But the Catholic Church had been very welcoming of telepaths from the very beginning of the "telepath scare" of 2115, maintaining that telepaths' gifts came from God, so Catholic churches had become something of a refuge for telepaths of all faiths who had to leave a bad family situation.

It was here, in this environment, that Amanda realized she was one, too. Not as strong as most of the others - she would have been a [P2 or P3 in rating system of later eras](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10978596) \- but enough that she found a new family among these other runaway teeps. People cared a lot less about rating in those days (especially since there were no official ratings where Amanda lived, like in a lot of places).

It was here in this communal Church home that she raised her daughter Grace, doing charity work with the rest of her time. Amanda was happy there. About half those who lived and worked in that church were telepaths (both the teens and the staff, priests and nuns), but there was never any trouble between people over these differences, at least not within the church. If anything, the telepaths were treated with extra respect, since they had a special gift from God.

They saw the news, of course - they heard the inflammatory rhetoric out of the United States, they saw that things were pretty bad in some places - but they had faith that they'd get through it, because if they'd learned to live and work side by side as equal human beings, in service of God, then others could learn to do the same.

Grace, the little girl, turned out to be a very strong telepath - she had already developed the talent by the age of five, in 2156. And then everything went to hell.

The Centauri landed.

Though the aliens came in peace, things got off on the wrong foot from the start. First, after the communication barriers were overcome, world leaders learned that the Centauri were claiming Earth as a long-lost Centauri colony. Even though human scientists quickly provided ample proof to their alien visitors that this was false, the rumor had already traversed the globe. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has got its pants on.

And people became especially scared because the Centauri, it turned out, also had telepaths in their population.

Reasonable people didn't care. So what? they said. The Centauri appear to also have poets and musicians and artists and dancers. They have brilliant engineers who build ships capable of flying across the cosmos and finding tiny little Earth. That they also have telepaths just shows how two races who evolved separately could arrive in similar places - convergent evolution. The human eye and the octopus eye have a lot in common, too. So what?

But the conspiracy theorists took to the 'nets to accuse human telepaths of being alien spies, if not aliens themselves, in their midst. They were a secret fifth column planted on Earth to infiltrate the planet and make it easier to the aliens to conquer everyone. They were agents of anarchy, sabotage, and political subversion. They had to be eliminated, _for the salvation of humanity._

Once again the Church spoke out against this anti-telepath attitude, and even embraced the new alien visitors, but to the conspiracy theorists, that just proved that the Church had been taken over by telepaths, by alien spies, both knowing and unknowing.

Once again, across the world, telepaths were murdered in the streets. Once again homes and businesses were vandalized and set ablaze. Once again telepaths were in danger.

Amanda didn't believe the violence would reach New Zealand, but it did.

An angry mob encircled their church one day, shouting, banging on the windows and doors, screaming for blood. They set the building on fire. Amanda told her daughter to run - run away. Go to town. Get help.

_Don't look back._

But Grace couldn't leave her mother. She hid herself in the bushes by the river, and watched.

She saw the townsfolk take everyone they could capture - priests, nuns, teens, even her mother - and tie them up. She saw them tie bricks to their feet, and carry the captives to the river and throw them in. She watched with disbelief as they drowned her mother, and she felt her mother die.

A part of her died as well. From that day on, she never trusted normals again.

The local paper covered her story - it was simply so tragic, so heart-wrenching, so utterly horrible that the community was moved to do all it could to help her. Word of her situation reached Geneva, where Kevin Vacit had just taken the reins as the director of the Corps in the aftermath of Crawford's assassination.

He decided he had to help her.

"She's suffered enough at the hands of mundanes," he thought. "She needs to be with her own kind." (Similar to what he later says about [Talia's grandmother](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10867419) when the Corps rescues her after a life of abuse: "She's already suffered enough at the hands of normals. We have everything she needs to straighten out right here. Structure, authority, and a family. She's confused and damaged, but it's not too late for her." Natasha Alexander: "The Corps is Mother and Father." Kevin Vacit: "And we need that, we orphans." Dark Genesis, p. 247.)

[He thought of his own mother](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12056229), also killed by mundanes, and how he, too, had witnessed her death - felt her death - at only four.

And so he sent representatives down to Christchurch to personally escort Grace back to Geneva. She would be raised not only in a Corps cadre, but in the first Cadre Prime (with her age group). (Grace was two years older than Natasha, so though they knew each other, they weren't very close.)

Grace went on to have a long career with the Corps. Her daughter, Elizabeth Chastain (b. 2172) was also raised in Cadre Prime and went on to be a teacher in the 6-10 house, and was one of Bester's teachers.


End file.
